Search engines are an integral part of today's electronic world. A search engine is generally powered by a collection of search indices. A search index may associate key words or combinations of key words to particular locations (such as web pages) containing, or related to, those key words. In order to generate and maintain these search indices, search engines often use crawlers to find and identify documents, and extract information from the documents. A web crawler requests a document (a web page) from the web server and indexes key words in the document. Web page metadata and heuristics may allow the crawler to recognize the importance or semantic meaning of various aspects of the document.
As the world transitions to more and more content being available through mobile platforms and some content only being available through mobile platforms, search engines increasingly rely on content from applications and not just content from web pages. However, with the wide variety of applications, and the nearly infinite ways in which content can be assembled and presented in these apps, recognizing and interpreting data from the apps is very difficult for a search engine.
Many apps themselves have internal search functionality. This functionality may be represented as shown in FIG. 1A, with the user beginning at a search input state (or, screen) 100 of a mobile application (equivalently, app). When the user performs a search from the search input state 100, a search results state 104 will be presented to the user with the results related to that search.
One of the search results may be selected, leading to an entity state. For example, as shown in FIG. 3, a set of results for a query of “thai” is shown. If one of those results is selected, an entity state relating to that result will be shown. An entity is essentially a noun and, in this context, generally refers to one of the discreet elements that the mobile app has knowledge of. For example, for a restaurant reviews app, the entities may include restaurants, cuisines, and specific dishes. For a movie showtimes app, the entities may include movie theaters and movies.
In FIG. 1B, a search input state 120, which may be the same as or different than the search input state 100, may allow a user to perform a search that leads to a search results state 124 having no corresponding entity states. As an example, see FIG. 4, where a single result for the weather at a given location is presented.
In FIG. 2A, an example home screen for the YELP restaurant app is shown. A text box 200 allows a user to type in a query and shows a hint of what text should be supplied. Once the user begins typing into the text box 200, the hint may disappear. The hint is identified by being a lighter shade of color compared to the color of input text (in this case, gray instead of black).
Canned searches, such as restaurants, bars, and coffee & tea, are shown at 204. A canned search allows a user to perform a predefined search rather than typing the query into the text box 200. Further, the canned search may be restricted to certain types of metadata. For example, typing the word “coffee” into the text box 200 may perform a search across multiple fields of restaurant data, including reviews and textual descriptions. So a full-text search may return restaurants that simply serve coffee, such as when coffee had been mentioned in one of the reviews of the restaurant. Meanwhile, a canned search for coffee may return only those establishments that have been classified as coffee shops.
In FIG. 2B, a query is entered in a text box 220, and the app provides potential autocomplete text 224, as well as instant results 228 that are relevant to what has been typed so far into the text box 220.
In FIG. 3, a search results state is shown for a query of “thai” and includes advertisements 240 as well as organic search results 244. Selecting (such as with a single tap) one of the results may lead to an entity state that displays additional information about the corresponding restaurant. In FIG. 4, a search results state includes only a single search result, which is the weather for a specific location (shown as Los Altos, Calif.).
The background description provided here is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.